wnsdpod

Bonus Ep 71 - We're Very Very Different: Irony

Added 2024-10-04 12:00:10 +0000 UTC

patrons, here's your second bonus episode for the month of September. it's a few days late but we trust you'll understand. the next part in our book club series on The Name of the Rose will be out in the next couple of weeks. thanks and enjoy!

in this episode, we actually talk about a way in which we're very very fucking different from the people of the past, not just those in the Middle Ages, but even our own parents and grandparents: Irony. obviously, dramatic and rhetorical irony have been around since storytelling began but a fully-involved ironic outlook on life is very recent, coming about around the 1800s and irony as a totalizing ethos that permeates all levels of culture and society is so new that it probably didn't start until 1965, at least according to Umberto Eco, and has only gotten more mainstream since then.

in this bonus, we want to explore Eco's ideas on enjoyment, postmodernism, irony, and post-irony and look at a way in which we're so different from our forebears that we may as well inhabit two different worlds. so we talk about Eco's story of when irony entered the mainstream in 1965 and then explore what that means for us today and why it might explain both the great generational divide between people born before and after 1978 as well as the reasons our parents wouldn't let us watch the Simpsons. enjoy!